[John James Jacoby]

Deep admin integration for all core components and logged-in Members – show me my activity in my User Profile, etc…

A default set of universally wrappable theme-side template parts for one-line-of-code integration into any WordPress theme/builder/blocks, that ultimately outputs what equates to a self-hosted Tumblr clone.

[John James Jacoby]

Weird!

Made the page a draft for now, so at least it won’t get indexed.

My guess is that mercime removed the docs (or restricted access to them).

There are obviously much better tools for documenting hooks these days than there were even 4 years ago, so perhaps that page can just get deleted and we can look into generating them over at https://developer.buddypress.org/reference/.

Thanks for the heads up!

[John James Jacoby]

This sounds like a totally reasonable suggestion. Thanks for making it.

cc @imath 💪

[John James Jacoby]

Hi there @jarkin13, sorry to hear that this is happening, and thanks for posting it here.

Can you check your WordPress site settings and let us know what Time Zone your site is set to?

I have a hunch BuddyPress is saving a value that is then impossible to format/convert, resulting in that output, and the most likely culprit is a Time Zone offset miscalculation.

Sorry again, and talk soon!

[John James Jacoby]

Can you post the contents of an email here?

Can you link to a topic that you’re subscribed to?

I’ll look into it. Thanks!

[John James Jacoby]

Hey @maximejobin! 👋

Sorry for the delay here. The codex no longer auto-roles people as Editors, because spam bots ruined that idea. I’ve added you manually though, so you’ve got the power!

[John James Jacoby]

@buddyboss Hey Michael!

I totally understand what you mean. I feel the same way about WordPress. Even simple whitespace changes there become endless discussions that result in no changes and no agreement, and worse… no fun.

My own personal concern here, comes from everyone involved in BuddyPress purposely trying to create an inviting, open, fun, rewarding experience to contribute to the project, and seeing talented folks like yourselves choose to compete instead of collaborate is the opposite of the target we are shooting for as a project.

What more could BuddyPress have done? What could the team have done differently? I’ve never really seen much in the way of upstream improvements or recommendations or requests in Trac or the forums from your team. Not that it’s necessary. Not that it’s expected. But there isn’t a history of anyone saying no or shutting y’all down.

I applaud the independence. I wish all y’all nothing but the best. And I hope BuddyPress is inspired from the creativity and inventiveness that BuddyBoss is known for.

[John James Jacoby]

Hey everyone. Thank you for the insightful conversation. This is exactly what forums and communities are for, and is a great example of why it is so important to have them.

This question has come up just about every 180 days for the past 10 years, for both bbPress and BuddyPress. I usually don’t chime in on them, because they almost always go through the same motions:

1. Some people are worried
2. Some people don’t like the core functionality
3. Some people think it’s too difficult
4. Some people think it’s not powerful enough
5. Development team defends the project
6. Unhappy people trash the project
7. Nobody really feels much better
8. People get bored and the topic fades away
9. Someone bumps it back up every once in a while

I’m replying here and now, because I agree a lot with everything everyone has said here, even if I don’t like or agree with how it’s said.

There are a lot of things about BuddyPress not to like. There has been a lot of added complexity over the years that has made it more difficult to understand and to work with. Building a community website with it takes a long time and requires a lot of experience to do well, and that’s even before the community has activity, membership, or growth.

Without a big huge obvious whale of an example community, and without a big huge corporate sponsor, it’s hard to see the penultimate standard for what BuddyPress can be used to achieve.

Because BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org are part of the WordPress.org network of sites, and because WordPress.org doesn’t really use the social features that BuddyPress provides, even it isn’t that great of an example anymore.

The folks at BuddyBoss have, no doubt, invested nearly the same ten years as the rest of us have, working hard to make something out of nothing, only with a different set of goals in mind, that now is taking them in an exciting new direction.

Having met several members of the BuddyBoss family, and after spending more than a few hours hanging out with them through the years at various WordPress related events, it cuts deep to hear how negative their perspective is on BuddyPress, but I don’t disagree with them, or think they’re wrong.

Ten years ago when everyone was excited about BuddyPress, wasn’t because of the technology or the tools or the potential. It was a pain in the butt to setup. It required a version of WordPress (MU) that didn’t even come with an installer. It did everything “the wrong way” and not “the WordPress way.”

Everyone was excited because it looked cool.

Source: Venturebeat

While not an exact clone, BuddyPress 1.0 popularized the 3 column design layout that Slack, Discord, Teams, and Mattermost, and others have built empires on top of today. Since 2.0 and later, we listened to user feedback instead of our guts, and worked to make BuddyPress simpler to drop into any WordPress installation, but in doing so we sacrificed the opinionated design that made all of us curious about what we could build on top it ourselves.

I believe BuddyPress is, still to this day, the single most important piece of software on the open web. It empowers anyone to foster free and open dialogue with the privacy and freedom of having their own website on their own hardware, while also being powerful enough to scale up and grow as a community of people garners momentum. And it empowers people like the folks at BuddyBoss to grow even beyond BuddyPress itself.

BuddyPress also continues to be a faithful sister-project to WordPress, bbPress, and GlotPress, acting as a playground for just about anyone to jump in and start helping improve the software that over 11 million users on WordPress.org and 300k other installations rely on to power their activity streams, member profiles, and more.

I personally have met or know a few hundred people that have amazing careers (in WordPress or elsewhere) because of the knowledge and insight that contributing to the BuddyPress project has trained them for. (This is one of the most valuable things about BuddyPress that you can’t write on the tin, in my opinion.)

To the folks that feel like leaving BuddyPress behind, happy trails until we meet again. And I hope we meet more often than we have, because our diversity of experiences and opinions is how we forge great open source software together, and that’s hard to find when you’re always looking inward at the same project for this long.

To the folks that love BuddyPress as much as I do, thanks for sticking around and helping out and being a part of this community here. The best is yet to come, with media attachments, database improvements, deeper WordPress Admin integration, and if wishes were fishes we’d revive a retro bp-sn-parent theme to bring some of that old excitement back again.

Here’s a corny quote from a favorite movie of mine that feels fitting:

I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

[John James Jacoby]

Thank you to everyone who contributed to 5.0.0!

(I’ve updated WordPress.org and BuddyPress.org to this latest version.)

[John James Jacoby]

Sorry for the problems here. They should be fixed.

[John James Jacoby]

Hey Kristjan,

Congrats on the success of your community!

BuddyPress is designed and architected to scale quite elegantly, so long as the underlying hardware can also support it. It’s a bit of a non-answer, but is ultimately what it boils down to.

(For example, WordPress.org has about 13 million registered user accounts, and on any given day they are active across the various connected properties, but there are a few dozen web servers handling the constant database reads & writes, API calls for software updates, caching various parts, etc…)

Group creation (and subsequent user memberships) all eventually just bubble down to a singular and easy to use function call, so depending on your parameters, and with a small custom plugin, could be automated pretty easily. Nothing exists in BuddyPress itself to facilitate the automation part, but there’s nothing preventing it either.

Perhaps to more directly answer your question, there is no technical limitation to the number of users or groups or group members your community could have, beyond the limitations of MySQL, PHP, and modern computing itself (maximum 32 bit integer value, etc…)

[John James Jacoby]

Hey @steverusso66! I noticed you hit an error when you posted your reply; sorry about that.

Everything should be all fixed up now.

[John James Jacoby]

BuddyPress 2.8.x works OK with WordPress 4.8.

BuddyPress 2.9 is due out in the next few weeks.

[John James Jacoby]

See: https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7445

[John James Jacoby]

This is an interesting problem, if I understand it correctly.

Your debug backtrace makes it look like the $wp_admin_nav array is somehow getting overloaded by the $wp_admin_bar global.

And it also looks like the bp_setup_admin_bar action is returning a string, instead of the array() that it’s hardcoded to pass in by default. It seems odd that PHP 7.1 would effect this, unless there’s something going on inside of WP_Hook, or we’ve goofed somewhere that isn’t obvious.

[John James Jacoby]

Thanks for the post, and thank you everyone that chimed in to alert the OP about the protocol for security concerns. Understanding it’s possible there’s a communication gap here, this topic does also read (to my eyes) as condescending & inflammatory, which is honestly not going to yield a very positive conversation. I think y’all did a great job staying positive, and I for one greatly appreciate that.

To be clear to anyone else that runs into this topic, what the OP sees is not a BuddyPress or bbPress bug; this is WordPress doing it’s best to show published content from public post types.

About BuddyPress:
* Neither BuddyPress nor bbPress modify this core behavior
* BuddyPress does not use this interface; bbPress does
* The .org sites have not disabled this, they just do not have any unusual content to leak

The gist:
* If plugins allow for private content, it’s up to those plugins to protect it
* If you create roles with content limitations, it’s up to you to confirm they’re working

For anyone looking to modify or restrict content that appears in this list, use the wp_link_query_args and wp_link_query filters to do so.

Here is how WordPress calculates the results in this list. Note that it only uses published posts from public post-types:

$pts = get_post_types( array( 'public' => true ), 'objects' );
$pt_names = array_keys( $pts );

$query = array(
	'post_type' => $pt_names,
	'suppress_filters' => true,
	'update_post_term_cache' => false,
	'update_post_meta_cache' => false,
	'post_status' => 'publish',
	'posts_per_page' => 20,
);

WordPress has a built-in way to calculate privacy scope using 'perm' => 'readable' and even that is not used here (though bbPress does use this in its own loops.) WordPress instead takes a strict position of published public content by default.

If anything unexpected is appearing here, it is not because of BuddyPress or bbPress, and we are still happy to help anyone discover the source of this in a new & more friendly topic.

[John James Jacoby]

Hi there! Where did you get the codex.fr.buddypress.org URL from? I have a hunch the reason you’re seeing this is because subdomains more than 1 level deep aren’t covered by our certificate, but I also don’t think we use those anywhere. If we do, we should correct those URLs to be more friendly.

That said, I suspect keeping codex content synchronized across multiple languages will be a pain. Maybe it’s easier (though obviously not very welcoming or inviting) to machine translate from English?

[John James Jacoby]

We’ve released 2.2.3.1 to address this.

It should appear in your dashboard shortly.

If the error is preventing you from accessing the dashboard, delete wp-content/plugins/buddypress completely, and try again.

[John James Jacoby]

Hi Anja,

You can reinstall 2.2.3, and this error will go away.

Sorry for the embarrassing inconvenience.

[John James Jacoby]

Sorry about that confusion. It may have been a reply that ended up in moderation for a bit. We’re working on improving that in bbPress for 2.6, which is the prerelease version we’re running here.

[John James Jacoby]

Note that there is a Trac ticket for this also, should it turn out to be some kind of BuddyPress bug: https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6194

[John James Jacoby]

I gave the Role bp_moderate but that did not solve the issue. There must be some other check that needs to be passed for these menu items to show up.

You may want to put a late filter on map_meta_cap to ensure it’s truly getting added, and not getting stomped or mapped back to manage_options.

Maybe a compromise could be found and some new functionality for the front end could be introduced that allows you to assign someone as Group Admin. I think i am not the only one that sees value in that Role especially in a big community where you have the need to moderate but do not want to give people access to the backend or higher Administrative privileges.

You’re on the right track. Each component could (and maybe should) come with its own hierarchy of roles. Just because someone can manage users doesn’t mean they can manage groups, if that makes sense?

I also don’t quite understand why a Group admin could not be derived from one of the Forum Roles. A forum Moderator or Keymaster should be able to moderate all Forums incl. the private group ones and could subsequently also be allowed to manage all groups.

Anything is possible, but I’m not sure this approach is a safe assumption for all installations. At least not in its current iteration.

All good ideas. Thanks @ubernaut for the bump.

[John James Jacoby]

That’s no good. Thanks for the report. We’ll do some testing and report back with the results.

[John James Jacoby]

@agentswall Are you saying that the link to create groups is missing? Are you able to go to groups/create manually and see the form?

[John James Jacoby]

@modemlooper That’s not a bad idea. I’ll work towards that approach after 2.2 goes out today.